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The UAW and Ford are working with the community in Kansas City to make health care more efficient and affordable. Louison discusses treatment with Solomon Dukes II.

Kansas and Missouri have different reporting requirements and methods of data collection for public health data. This fact, the study noted, makes it difficult for consumers, health care professionals and political leaders to assess health and health care delivery in the bi-state metropolitan area.

Further restricting the data available to health care planners, several area hospitals chose not to participate in the Lewin Group's Hospital Survey.

"One out of every seven dollars--about 13 percent--in the U.S. is spent on health care," says Brent Schondelmeyer of the Local Investment Commission, a state-funded community collaborative to improve child welfare in Jackson County. "That's a lot of money, but we know surprisingly little about how it's spent. The UAW-Ford report is a great gift to the community. If they hadn't done it, I don't know who else would."

The product of two years of research by the Lewin Group, a nationally recognized health and human services consulting firm, the report attracted widespread attention in the local media when it was released May 31.

As the findings became known, the UAW and Ford came to be seen as major players among health care activists across the metro area.

Data from the report sparked a series of discussions about how unions, employers, political leaders, health care purchasers, providers, and consumers can work together to provide community-wide access to high quality, cost-effective care.

Davis and co-director Elaine Artzer have presented the findings to the Mayor's Access to Health Care Commission in Wyandotte County in Kansas and to members of the Kansas City (Mo.) City Council among many others.

To date, they have provided more than 200 copies of the 700-page Community Assessment Factbook to interested health care professionals, political leaders, and community groups.

Cathy Davis (left), co-director of the UAW-Ford Community Health Care Initiative in Kansas City, talks with her co-director Elaine Artzer.

"Our next step is to put the study data to work," says Davis. This fall, the Community Health Care Initiative will host a series of discussions designed to reach a consensus among members of the health care community about ways to improve the health care delivery system in Kansas City.

The Community Health Care initiatives helped launch a collaborative effort by all the health plans, the medical society, and the three medical schools to develop best practices for the treatment of certain ulcers caused by the H.pylori bacteria.

The CHCI program was first initiated in 1994 and negotiated into the auto contracts in 1996 to enhance the quality of health care through cooperation of the stakeholders in the community.

Kansas City is one of seven pilot cities--others are Flint, Mich., Anderson and Kokomo, Ind., Warren-Youngstown, Ohio, Wilmington, Del., and Kenosha, Wis.--where the UAW and automakers Ford, GM, and DaimlerChrysler have embarked on local health care initiatives.

The UAW-Ford Community Health Care Initiative's Community Assessment Factbook can be viewed on the group's website at www.kchealth.org.